Rocking the Boat: A Brief History of Anti-Migrant Hysteria in Canada
By Fathima Cader
Cross-posted at Vancouver Media Coop.
Photo Credit Reuters/RCMP
They’re at it again.
In November, 76 Tamil refugees escaped Sri Lanka on a rusty freighter. They arrived in Victoria, where they were met by RCMP and Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) officials, who promptly jailed them for three months on allegations of terrorism. It would be fully half a year before the CBSA would admit that it had never had any evidence.
By then, however, it was too late: anti-Tamil and anti-refugee hysteria had spread like wildfire. Now, mere weeks after that most tepid of mea culpas from the CBSA, the hysteria greeting the Tamil MV Sun Sea passengers is worse. As with the Ocean Lady, these migrants will be detained in Maple Ridge jails before their refugee claims are considered. The Conservatives have begun to create new rules to treat refugees who arrive by boat differently from others. Meanwhile, Paul Fromm, the infamous neo-Nazi, has been receiving uncritical coverage in mainstream media with his demands that the migrants be sent back.
As the paranoia grows ever more heightened, it becomes increasingly important that we resist it. The universal rights of safety and mobility must be upheld, not only for the Sun Sea migrants, but for all people fleeing violence.
1. Sri Lanka: War, Then “Peace”
In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government closed 26 years of intermittent civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) with the killing of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians. The International Crisis Group (ICG), an advising NGO to the UN, notes the Sri Lankan government was able to achieve a massacre of this magnitude by, among other things, the targeted shelling of non-combatants:
The government and security forces encouraged hundreds of thousands of civilians to move into ever smaller government-declared No Fire Zones and then subjected them to repeated and increasingly intense artillery and mortar barrages and other fire.
The government followed its declaration of victory by forcing over a quarter of a million Tamil civilians into detention camps. Some 80,000 Tamils are still behind barbed wire. Numerous NGOs have condemned the desperate living conditions in the camps, citing severe overcrowding, erratic medical care, and irregular access to water. About a third of children under the age of five in the camps are moderately or severely malnourished.
Meanwhile, roughly 12,000 detainees have been transferred, on suspicion of involvement with the LTTE, to separate prisons operated by Sri Lankan security forces and affiliated paramilitary groups. Many of these groups have been implicated in human rights violations. Amnesty International contends that the “incommunicado detention of suspects in irregular places of detention [...] has been a persistent practice in Sri Lanka associated with torture, killings and enforced disappearances.”
2. Escape
Small wonder then that people are fleeing Sri Lanka. Yet the escapes they attempt are only marginally less dangerous than the situations they leave behind. One of the Ocean Lady migrants described his 45-day long journey thus:
All of the faces on the ship were new, no one knew each other. What I saw were people who feared for their lives. [...] At the beginning of the trip, it was extremely hot on the ship. We would go for fresh air on the deck, but most passengers stayed in the bottom of the ship. We must have been way deep under the water. At the end of the trip and closer to Canada, the cold was extremely difficult to handle. [...] This is a journey that plays with death: We faced seven or eight treacherous storms, and I remember one — on maybe Oct. 10 or Oct. 11 — that still haunts me. I thought death was inevitable.
His account of their arrival in Canada provides some humanising context to the photograph of waving men that became associated with the story:
Two days before we arrived, we saw an airplane that had the word ‘Canada’ on it in green letters. People from the bottom of the ship raced to the top and started waving their hands. Everyone was hopeful, we were so happy just to communicate with someone.
3. The Ocean Lady
Soon after that picture was taken all 72 refugees were taken to a Maple Ridge jail. Meanwhile, the Canadian government went into overdrive. Alykhan Velshi, Kenney’s spokesperson, went on record with rhetoric flamboyant enough to rival most Internet message boards, such as when he proclaimed, “We won’t allow Canada to become a place of refuge for terrorists, thugs, snakeheads and other violent foreign criminals.” (In his analyses of the politics of global migration, the imminent danger of “snakeheads” is always a recurring fear for Velshi.)
They remained in jail while the government argued that they were terrorists and thus ineligible to make refugee claims. The RCMP contacted the Sri Lankan government to identify the detainees, endangering their families in Sri Lanka, despite objections from lawyers and civil liberties advocates.
Rohan Gunaratna, head of a think tank in Singapore, was the source of most of the government’s “evidence.” He was soon discredited. Immigration and Refugee Board adjudicator Otto Nupponen charged that besides Gunaratna’s lack of sources, there was an “ongoing close relationship between Dr. Gunaratna and the government of Sri Lanka.”
By January, every one of the migrants had been released, but it would be another six months before the CBSA would finally admit that it had had no proof.
4. The MV Sun Sea
It has been scarcely a month since that admission. On August 13, after nearly three months at sea, the Sun Sea arrived in Victoria. Roughly 490 people were on board, including women and children. The CBSA has already removed some of the children from their parents and placed them in BC foster care. After “processing” is complete, the refugees will be moved to two Maple Ridge jails.
This mass imprisonment occurs when only last month the Conservatives revealed that, despite falling crime rates, it intends to spend billions of dollars on expanding prisons. In addition, provincial officials have stated that BC will receive “full compensation” from Ottawa for “housing” the migrants. This speaks to the interlocking relationship of Canada’s immigration and prison systems. Still, few care to admit that if refugees are a financial burden on the system, it is because Canada is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars jailing them.
5. Speculation as News
The criminalisation of refugees, however, is a process that extends well beyond the walls of Canadian jails, buttressed as it is by shoddy journalism. First, the number 500 is being used to whip up fears of “tides” of refugees pouring into Canada. In fact, only a small minority of the 20 million refugees worldwide make claims in the West. Canada accepts less than 0.1% of this population. On top of this, the Sun Sea migrants constitute only 0.1% of the refugees who even apply to Canada.
Second, every article about the Sun Sea opens by reprinting the allegations against the Ocean Lady migrants. Most of these articles do not mention that all the allegations were proven false. The kinder articles limit themselves to ambiguous statements like “All have since been released [and] few, if any, face a realistic prospect of deportation.” Many are much more disingenuous. The National Post authoritatively reported:
According to a Canada Border Services Agency report – marked secret and obtained by the Vancouver Sun through the Access to Information Act – at least 25 of the 76 migrants were members of the Tamil Tigers.
The CBSA created this report in January, the Vancouver Sun published it in June, and the CBSA publicly recanted it in July.
One Globe and Mail editorial pondered thusly:
All 76 Sri Lankan Tamils from the first migrant smuggling ship, Ocean Lady, which arrived in B.C. last October, were released after 60 days in detention, and all now await refugee hearings. Not one was declared ineligible to make a claim, despite expert testimony from Ronan Gunaratna.
Tragically, they were unable to spell said expert’s name (Rohan) correctly.
6. Tamil, Tiger, Terrorist.
A National Post article printed the following:
Gunaratna [...] said there were Tamil Tiger leaders among the group that arrived on the Ocean Lady and even more onboard the MV Sun Sea. “The ship carries not just refugees, but is staffed by a Tamil Tiger crew,” said Mr. Gunaratna, who has studied the Tamil Tigers and their 25-year war, since 1984. The Tamils lost their fight for an independent homeland in Sri Lanka’s north in May 2009.
How can a sentence about the LTTE segue so blithely into a gross generalisation about all Tamil people? How can Tamil people have “lost their fight” when not all Tamil people are separatists?
Since the end of the war, Sri Lanka’s government has resisted all calls for impartial investigations into its alleged and ongoing war crimes. Accordingly, the ICG’s recommendations included this specific note for Canada:
11. Do not extradite LTTE suspects to Sri Lanka unless guarantees of humane treatment and fair trials are in place. Instead prosecute in domestic courts where possible and appropriate.
In the Sri Lankan state’s imagination, all Tamils are LTTE suspects. It used this formulation to justify the blanket killings and detentions. Furthermore, this is the fiction Sri Lanka continues to sell to the rest of the world. Approximately 1,000 Tamil asylum seekers, for instance, have fled to Australia. Experts there have responded to claims that half of them are Tiger supporters by pointing out that most Tamils would necessarily have had contact with the LTTE, since the group had ruled a large swath of northern Sri Lanka.
Yet the vilification of the Sun Sea migrants, both for being Tamil and being refugees, is so unchecked in Canada, that the day after their arrival, Fromm was able to arrange a rally of “concerned citizens of Victoria” at CFB Esquimalt, where the migrants are being held. Fromm, who had already arranged a rally with the White National Aryan Guard outside Kenney’s Alberta office, sent out a press release entitled, “Stop the Tamil Tiger Smuggling Ship.” Its premise is that “the Sun Sea is just the beginning of an all-out invasion.” To that end, it concludes with “Send the illegals back!!!!!”
CTV is now serving as Fromm’s soap box. In none of its coverage – neither its online video interview with him nor on Victoria’s main radio station, C-FAX 1070 – have his connections with the KKK been disclosed, thereby accelerating the normalisation of his racism.
Little wonder, then, that besides all this, there is no acknowledgement of the hypocrisy of Canada, a settler country built on the theft of Indigenous lands and the forced assimilation of Indigenous communities, denying brutalised people their right to safety.
Instead, the collective punishment of the Sun Sea migrants is being presented as necessary “to reverse this country’s growing international reputation as an easy mark,” thus making synonyms of “refugee” and “criminal.” One article quoted Gunaranta saying, “Canada’s response to the Ocean Lady determined the MV Sun Sea’s voyage because it was a weak response.”
“Weak” is an odd word to describe the release of innocent civilians from jail.
7. “Boat People”: “None is too many.”
Keith Martin, Liberal MP for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, has argued that “the feds are using the migrants as a straw man to make themselves look strong.” In his words, “[Public Safety Minister Vic] Toews loves to talk about this boat being filled with terrorists and human traffickers. But if you’re a trafficker, you don’t get on a boat and spend three months risking your life on a filthy, crowded boat.”
However, despite opposition, the Conservatives have begun working on new tools that would treat refugees who arrive by boat differently from other claimants. Yet according to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, to which Canada is a signatory, refugees cannot be penalised for arriving without pre-authorization or irregularly. Moreover, the number of Sea Sun migrants is about the same as the number of asylum seekers who arrive in Canada by plane in a week. Yet refugees who arrive by sea have always been stigmatised more than those who arrive on shiny airplanes.
In 1914, the Komagata Maru arrived with 376 Indian passengers, most of them Sikh. “Hindu invaders now in Vancouver harbor,” read a newspaper headline. They were forbidden to disembark for two months, until the ship was finally forced to leave. British soldiers killed 26 of the passengers upon their return to India.
In 1939, the St. Louis, carrying 900 Jewish passengers, sought entry into Canada, but the Immigration Director said no country could “open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: The line must be drawn somewhere.” The ship returned to Europe. Most of its passengers were killed in concentration camps.
In 2008, the federal and provincial governments were forced to issue apologies for the Komagata Maru. Now, two years later, if those words are to mean anything, we cannot afford to repeat history: let them stay.
For a concise breakdown of the 6 most popular myths about refugees see Myths and Realities about 490 Tamil Refugees on MV Sun Sea.
—–
FATHIMA CADER is a law student at the University of British Columbia.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://thisisworldtown.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter4.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://thisisworldtown.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su.png){kind=icon}
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sana & Ausma, Sana & Ausma. Sana & Ausma said: FEATURE: Rocking the Boat: A Brief History of Anti-Migrant Hysteria in #Canada http://bit.ly/9r1A2G #refugee [...]
The Tamil Tigers, the world’s most brutal terrorist group that invented the sucide vest and killed and injured over 100,000 Sri Lankans, Indians and foreigners have moved into human smuggling. The Tamil Tigers divided and disrupted the different communities for thirty years. With the Tamil Tigers eliminated in May 2009, the different communities in that beautiful island are coming together. Like the article published above, the Tamil Tigers in Canada used the money they raised through arms, human and drug smuggling to hire spokespersons in Canada to pressurize Canada to allow the passengers smuggled by the Tamil Tigers into Canada.
The Tamil Tigers have a huge lobbying capacity - they use a lot of misinformation and disinformation and they hire lawyers in Canada, former diplomats in Australia, academics in Sweden and other white collar criminals to make their case. Among those recruited by the Tamil Tigers in Canada include Harsha Walia and other fake rights activist towing the Tamil Tigers agenda. The Chief Tiger spokesperson David Poopalapillai and the Tiger front in Canada - the Canadian Tamil Congress - should be imprisoned and their offices shut down forever. Similarly Obama for Tamils, another Tamil Tiger front and the Tamil Tiger chief in the US V Rudrakumaran behind Obama for Tamils should be jailed.
The Tamil Tigers destroyed our lives for thirty years. Now the war has ended and everyone is living in peace. The Tamil Tigers not only killed innocent Tamils but forcibly raised funds and threatened us to participate in demonstrations against Canada and Sri Lanka in Canada. The Tamil Tigers are trying to regroup. Canada must not allow this - as a Tamil I ask the Prime Minister of Canada to jail the Tamil Tiger ship leaders and crew members but allow those innocent Tamils into Canada. As a Tamil who has suffered from the Tigers, I also ask Canadian government not to allow Tamil Tigers to function in Canada as non profilt and charity organizations. David Poopalapillai is a Tamil Tiger and he is working and supporting the human smugglers.
As the Prime Minister of Canada and Ministers of Public Safety has said the LTTE is engaged in human smuggling. They have confirmed what Rohan Gunaratna has stated that the ships MV Sun Sea and MV Ocean Lady that reached Canada are LTTE ships. Fortunately, the Canadian government took his advice and appointed Rohan Gunaratna as an advisor to the Federal Government. The terrorist and criminal groups are terrified when he comes on the media and name them.
The LTTE has damaged the reputation of the Tamils, a hardworking and a honest people. We have to take a stand against the LTTE before they reestablish themselves again in another country after they were defeated in Sri Lanka. The LTTE intention is to establish itself in Canada with the 20 million Canadian dollars they raised in the Sun Sea smuggling venture. Also, Canada must help to take action against Tamil Tiger leaders and their fronts in Canada bnow supporting the Sun Sea smugglers. Otherwise more ships will come. Sending ship to Canada is big business!
Fathima Cader and Harsha Walia have been misguided by the Canadian Tamil Congress, the Tamil Tiger office in Canada. The Tigers are using the funds from the human smuggling venture to recruit journalists and activists.
As a Canadian I ask RCMP and CSIS to investigate them.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Traces of explosives potential danger to Tamils’ case
JANE ARMSTRONG
VANCOUVER — From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail
More traces of explosives have been found on the migrant ship that brought 76 Sri Lankan Tamil men to Canada last month, a Canada Border Services Agency officer has testified.
The explosive RDX - also known as cyclonite or hexogen - is used to make plastic explosives, mainly for the military. Its residue was discovered in three separate parts of the Princess Easwary, which was intercepted off the coast of Vancouver Island on Oct. 17.
Traces of two other explosives were found on two items of clothing seized when Canadian authorities boarded the ship and took the migrants into custody.
This latest revelation - made at a detention hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board - is potentially damaging to the migrants.
All of the migrants claim to be Tamil refugees fleeing persecution in Sri Lanka. All told, border officers who scoured and swabbed the ship came up with 10 positive results for traces of explosives.
Some terrorism experts - including a scholar who is the main adviser to the Canadian government in the case - have alleged that at least two of the men are members of the Tamil Tigers, the military arm of a violent separatist group that waged a decades-long war with the Sri Lankan government. There have also been allegations that the migrants’ ship was previously a Tamil Tiger gun-running vessel that transported weapons from North Korea to Sri Lanka.
But the lawyer for more than 20 of the Tamil migrants said the positive tests for explosives traces mean little. If anything, the fact that the amounts found are relatively small undermines the argument that this was a gun-running ship. If it truly was used to transport weapons and explosives, far more residue would have been detected, Lorne Waldman said in an interview after the hearing.
“They are claiming this is a weapons smuggling ship,” he said in a telephone interview from Toronto. “They are talking about microscopic traces of explosives. … It’s not plausible that a ship that was dedicated to smuggling weapons” produced so few positive results.
Mr. Waldman said it would not be unusual to find traces of explosives - some of which were found on the migrants’ clothing - if the men had been near conflict zones. The lawyer yesterday put that scenario to CBSA officer Chantal Lee, who analyzed swabs from the ship.
But Ms. Lee said she couldn’t answer that. “All I know is that I took the samples and the results were positive,” she testified.
Lawyers for the migrants have cross-examined three witnesses who have provided testimony for Canadian authorities in their attempts to determine if the migrants are terrorists or genuine refugees.
Last week, Mr. Waldman grilled Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert who has been the chief adviser to Canadian authorities probing the migrants’ identities and backgrounds.
Yesterday, Mr. Waldman questioned Ms. Lee, who tested dozens of swabs taken from the ship. She said she discovered “three hits” of the explosive RDX in swabs taken from different parts of the ship.
Later, more samples that were sent to Ottawa for testing yielded five positive results for the explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, she said. PETN is also used in heart medication.
The latest revelations about the RDX discovery brings to 10 the number of positive test results for explosive residue found on the Princess Easwary. Earlier, CBSA officers found trace amounts of TNT and PETN on two items of clothing seized from the ship.
It’s been more than a month since the migrant ship sailed into Canadian waters off Vancouver Island. Today, all but one of the 76 men remain behind bars as border officials attempt to establish their identities.
In other testimony, a border intelligence officer said he learned that the migrant ship was headed to Canadian waters two days before it arrived. Russ MacNeil testified that ships of that size are required to notify a country’s coast guard 96 hours before arriving. When the ship failed to declare itself, a federal fisheries airplane was sent to observe it. From aerial photos, border officials were able to glean that the ship was called Ocean Lady. This later proved to be a fake name and its real name was the Princess Easwary.
Foreign Nations Must Be Made Aware Of Tamil Tiger Ploy To Use Human Smuggling To Regroup, Particularly Canada!
Posted on August 23rd, 2010
Aug.23rd 2010
The recent brilliant analysis by Dr Rohan Gunaratne the specialist terrorism analyst based in Singapore conveys an all important caution to the world that Foreign Tamil Tiger militants based outside Sri Lanka are turning to human-smuggling operations to raise money in a bid to revive the group, which was decimated by government forces last year,and a caution which needs to be heeded towards preventing the once most dangerous terror group in the world from ever raising its head!
Preying on the sympathies of Nations like Canada these conniving residual Tamil Tiger criminals who are not entirely wiped out and continuing to maintain their efforts to recussitate the liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam now defunct in Sr Lanka should never be granted any means towards their ambitions and the recent shipload of so called refugees which is being viewed very judiciously by the Canadian authorities and law enforcement as a possible terrorist threat seems to be exactly what Dr. Gunaratne has overviewed asindeed a terrorist threat and needs to be taken to task objectively and tangibly.
It has been discovered through intelligence investigations that the rebel operatives who organised a human shipment aboard the Sun Sea cargo vessel that arrived in Canada last week charged up to C$50,000 (Dh31,333) per person, as outlined in the latest report by Dr.Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore where the head count of Tamil would be refugees on board was said to be about 492.
It cannot be dispelled entirely that the Tamil Tiger organization albeit non existent in Sri Lanka is not a
threat to global security as there are warnings signs flashing vividly to the discerning analyst scrutinizing the issue on an ongoing basis of which Dr. Gunaratne is a part of as the many activities of Tamil Tiger representation globally point to the reality that they still have funds and means sufficient enough to regroup and launch further attempts towards their ultimate goal where only a substantial base is now missing.
India once thought of as a prime location for this is now intolerant of their clandestine and surreptitious activities and monitoring them on a daily basis, particularly in regions like Tamil Nadu once a hub of pro LTTE activity now outlawed and viewed with near zero tolerance towards maintaining India’s cordial relations with Sri Lanka as well as the related protocols where even certain LTTE sympathetic political groups are unwelcome and incarcerated whenever they step out of line and the ignominious name of Vaiko crops up instantly along with many others of similar ilk and consequently the would be future Ealamites are now looking for a more fertile and safer base to operate out of, where Canada seems to be their ideal choice as many pointers to this indicate so Canada Be Warned!!
It is indeed heartwarming for the global community that after so much global terrorism which still continues to plagues the world perhaps to a lesser degree, many powerful and prominant nations have taken up the cause to outlaw Tamil Tiger terrorism and any other forms of global terrorism where running them into the ground is the only option and it would be a travesty of justice if terror groups such as the Tamil Tigers are permitted any leeway through the lack of insight and perceptionon the part of some to see through their ploys and be hoodwinked into believing their cause is legitimate by virtue of their theatrics and an outpouring of fecund sympathy with no substantial reason for it!
In this respect the recent stand by the Canadian authorities need to be applauded and it is hoped that this would continue without wavering or prevaricating towards Global Security!